For the last ten years we've built document automation for law firms. The idea was always simple: a firm's best work, the templates it trusts and the clauses it stands behind should be reusable, so every draft begins in their voice.

The part that never got easier was building the standard in the first place. A firm's best work is rarely where you need it. The strongest clause sits in a closed matter, a dusty repository, a partner's desktop. To turn all of it into one agreed template, someone has to find every version, work out clause by clause which one the firm really stands behind, then get partners to agree. It takes months nobody has, so it usually loses to billable work. The firm drafts from its last document instead of its best one and pays twice for work it already owns.

Then AI arrived and looked, for a while, like the answer. It wasn't quite the case. It made drafting faster, which isn't the same as better. Point a model at everything a firm has produced, with nothing marking the best, and it reaches for the average. In law almost right is still wrong, so the hour you save on the first draft you spend again checking it. The hard part, the standard underneath, was still missing.

What changed recently is that AI got good enough to do that hard part. Good enough to read a messy pile of executed deals, recognise the same clause however it's worded and wherever it's buried, then lay the versions side by side for a lawyer to choose between.

That's the capability we'd wanted for a decade and never had. So we built it. It's called Curate.

It reads up to twenty of your executed deals and helps you turn them into one clean, approved template, clause by clause. You approve each one, so nothing enters the standard a partner hasn't signed. The work that used to take months, now takes hours. And because the standard is approved and fixed, it reproduces: every draft starts from your firm's own best work, not a fresh guess from a model. Curate can then evolve - when a lawyer wins a sharper clause or the market changes, Curate can feed this in, so the standard stays alive instead of going stale the moment it's finished. It compounds in quality.

None of this is a bet against AI. It's the layer that underpins both AI drafting and document automation. Use the models for the reach and the open questions. Draw the answer you put your name to, from work you've already approved. Leverage automation to scale it reliably. Both, not either.

What the first firms are finding

We've been building Curate with a small group of design-partner firms, on their own deals, before saying much about it publicly. The point was to see whether it held up on real work, not in a demo.

Conan Hines, Global Head of Innovation and Knowledge, Fried Frank says, "Firms have always known the value buried in their deal history and have never had a practical way to extract it. Turning that into a living, lawyer-approved standard is the best possible problem to solve for and doing it well could reshape how firms think about their precedents entirely.”

The judgement was always in your firm. Curate is the first time you can put all of it to work, on every matter.